I have never used Dreamweaver so this is just a general answer.
All background colors or images will show through text. Just apply the background-image (I don't know how this is done in Dreamweaver) and then put text in the div or p tag as normal.
<div style="background-image: url(image.jpg);"><p>text in div</p></div>
or with a table
<table style="background-image: url(image.jpg);">
<tr><td>
<p>text in div</p>
</td></tr></table>
If you have an image that is not a background and you want text on top of it, then you can apply CSS layers; (not what Dreamweaver calls layers); see:-
http://www.wickham43.supanet.com/tutorial/layers.html
but you should be abe to do what you want with a background-image.
Code downloaded to my PC will be deleted in due course.
WIN7; IE9, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari for Windows; screen resolution usually 1366*768.
Also IE6 on W98 with 800*600 and IE8 on Vista 1440*900.